robert spencer-did muhammad exist__ an inquiry into islams obscure origins-intercollegiate studies institute (2012) (1)

“anyone who establishes in Islam a good sunna”—that is, an “accepted practice”—and warns against
“anyone who establishes in Islam an evil sunna.” 8 This presupposes that Islamic leaders will establish
new practices and that some of these practices may be good and some evil—a clear departure from the
idea that “every innovation is heresy.”
Did Muhammad equivocate? Did he forbid innovation and then change his mind, or vice versa?
Possibly; however, these two traditions can be harmonized by coming down against innovation while
interpreting the second hadith as meaning that as new issues arise, they must be judged in light of
Muhammad's words and deeds. In any case, in this as in all matters pertaining to Islamic law,
Muhammad's example (along with the word of the Qur'an) is paramount, and hadiths recording that
example are decisive.
The Contentless Sunna
One of the most curious aspects of Muhammad's paramount importance in Muslim law and practice is that
there is absolutely no evidence that the Muslims who actually knew the prophet of Islam kept records of
what he said and did. If the canonical account of the origins of Islam is true, then the material in the
Hadith about Muhammad's words and deeds existed, and presumably circulated in Muslim communities,
for nearly two centuries before it was finally sifted, judged for authenticity, collected, and published. Yet
there is no indication of this material's presence.
The early caliphs do not appear ever to have invoked Muhammad's example. The word caliph means
“successor” or “representative,” and in the traditional understanding the caliphs were successors to the
prophet. But the first four caliphs who ruled after Muhammad's death—known as the “rightly guided
caliphs”—issued coins that proclaimed them to be the “caliphs of Allah,” rather than the expected
“caliphs of the prophet of Allah.” Apparently the early caliphs saw themselves as vice-regents or vicars
of Allah on earth, not as the successors of Allah's prophet.
One scholar of Islam, Nabia Abbott, contends that there is no record of the early caliphs invoking the
hadiths of Muhammad because the caliph Umar (634–644) ordered hadiths destroyed. He did so, she
says, because he feared that a collection of the Hadith would rival and compete with the Qur'an. 9 But if
Umar really did order the records of Muhammad's words and deeds destroyed, despite the Qur'an's
numerous exhortations to obey and imitate him, how could later Muslims have preserved them in such
quantity? Did Muslims really preserve wheelbarrows full of hadiths against the express orders of the
Leader of the Believers, or hold it all in their memories with absolute fidelity?
We begin to hear about Muhammad's example from the same caliph who built the Dome of the Rock,
claimed to have collected the Qur'an (after the caliph Uthman was supposed to have done it decades
earlier), and created the first coins and inscriptions mentioning Muhammad as the prophet of Allah: the
Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik. Reigning from 685 to 705, Abd al-Malik called rebels to obey Allah and
the sunna of his prophet. 10 (By contrast, an earlier caliph, Muawiya, had referred to the “sunna of Umar,”
his predecessor. 11 ) The Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, whom some hadiths report as having
edited the Qur'an and destroyed variant texts, scolded a Kharijite rebel: “You have opposed the book of
God and deviated from the sunna of his prophet.” 12